Creative Critical Reflection

The Final Hurrah!

See You in the Funny Papers WK. 5 (4/3-4/7) #15

I can see the finishing line, it approaches at the speed of light and I can't help but feel like so much has happened since then. With every blog I write I realize how much I've grown as not only a designer and photographer, but as a person as well. I know that all that I have learned in this project will stay with me forever and the wanting to pursue this as a career will never go away. I adored the process even though it wasn't at all nice and easy. I endured many hardships and even fought with my own technological storm-cloud. thankfully I have come out of the other end victorious and actually satisfied with my work. I can only hope that my audience will enjoy it as much as I did creating it. I attach to this blog pictures of me organizing my shoot:

The One Before the Last WK. 5 (4/3-4/7) #14


As this project comes to an end I see no need to change anything else and am so very proud of the work I have accomplished. I thank my subject and all my peers who aided me in this journey and know I could not have gotten through it without them.  I think back to the most essential thing, in my opinion, that I learned during this journey was to be patient. I lost my creativity many times and often thought I would not be able to complete this project altogether. But lo and behold, I have created something that not only my mom can say she's proud of, but something I can be proud of myself. While I loved my initial idea, and hold within me in deep regards, I cannot deny how much more I like my new design. I guess that I listened to my inner bailaora and decided that the color-scheme, font, and design I had chosen originally was good, but not good enough. I concluded that thanks to all of those who gave me feedback, I was able to mold my idea into a more universal art piece. One that would not only be appealing to younger, bolder audiences, but to older, more reserved audiences as well. I think that in that sense, the person that helped me the most was my mom. As a flamenco lover, she loves learning about new styles of flamenco, upcoming flamenco events, and new dancers diversifying the world of flamenco. So I asked her if she would be interested in reading my magazine, with my original layout, and she very sweetly said that she would love to, but then I restated my question and asked her if she would read it not knowing it was mine, and she smiled coyly and said "absolutely not." The problem in that is that the audience I want to target doesn't come with an age range. I want to appeal to all the generations of flamenco paramours. So in order to do so I got to working on a whole different ball park of ideas and came up with what I have now. I decided to ask her the same question with my new and improved version and mid-giggle, with a cheeky little wink she said, "I signed, sealed, delivered my 2-year subscription."

The Beginning of the End WK. 5 (4/3-4/7) #13

So close to the end but yet so far. I am brainstorming ideas for how to create a successful CCR and so far have come up with a few pointers apart from the ones given to me by my instructor:

• Explain my process from day one.
• Any hardships in the photography part of the project?
• What inspired me to do magazine project over film one?
• Why did I change my initial idea so drastically from what I started with?
• What drove me to want to interview who I did and why?
  
  Instructor given:
• How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? 
• How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text? 
• How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 
• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

Bull's-eye WK. 4 (3/27-4/2) #12


Every decision executed, thought processed and change made has been done with the sole intention of pleasing my target audience as much as possible, without compromising my general idea or purpose. I have tried many different approaches to my magazine and have at last decided on a final design. I can't even begin to tell how many people I asked about my design and how many opinions I received. At the end of the day, those people would be the ones reading my magazine and  I knew I had to make some changes in order to appeal to a wider audience in the same range of my targeted one. So I basically changed everything, from the color scheme, to the initial layout and especially my cover. I think the cover is the one that transformed the most out of all the other pages, and to be perfectly honest I'm glad it did. I absolutely adore my cover and magazine in its entirety. I am sure that this new and improved version of A Lo Andaluz is going to leave my target audience dehydrated with intrigue and they'll have to look inside to quench their thirst. Here are a few pages:

Onward! WK. 4 (3/27-4/2) #11



Today I finally got down to finalizing the index and feel so good about it, I might cry. I suffered a bit with the program I am using, and all of those little boxes were a pain in the booty to arrange and scale with each other, but nothing that can't be fixed with the help from my tech-savvy brother. He guided me through it and I managed to create this:

Notice what I said in other blog about my color scheme and how the beige and the new font makes it easier on the eyes. I am truly satisfied with this index and can't wait to finalize other designs in the rest of the magazine.